This year the traveling Service Weekend will be at the Detroit Waldorf School in the much-beset-with-economic-woes city of Detroit. The school will get us painting, digging, wiring, carpentering (skills anyone?) and generally sprucing up the beautiful old building that houses this little Waldorf school. See the Motor City while lending a hand to a school with a long-standing special mission to serve Detroit's children of all nationalities and economic levels.

Save the dates and come along to help! Contact aturowski@awsna.org for information.

Warm regards,

Patrice Maynard and Frances Kane

AWSNA Leadership

Waldorf Alumni Gathering

December 21, 2012

San Francisco, CA

Over 70 attendees were at September's Waldorf Alumni event in Boston! Lucky's Lounge was the venue and the chef was Waldorf alum Luke Beardslee. Special thanks go to Marjorie Jean-Paul and to Jeannene La Bella from the Waldorf School of Garden City for inaugurating this event and carrying the main organizational work with help from AWSNA. And many thanks go to all the schools who helped to sponsor and support this event: Cape Ann Waldorf School, The Waldorf School of Lexington, The Waldorf High School of Massachusetts Bay, all from the immediate area were well-represented by alumni, teachers, staff, and parents. Also, community members from the Waldorf schools of Garden City, Green Meadow, High Mowing, Merriconeag, Garden City, Hawthorne Valley, Monadnock, Highland Hall, Kimberton, and Waldorf Institute of Southern Michigan all had loyal party-goers in attendance.

Please plan to join us for the next Waldorf Alumni event in San Francisco this December! Contact Patrice Maynard at pmaynard@awsna.org for more information.

More News from Why Waldorf Works

Impact Investing Fund RSF Social Finance

Offers Alternatives To Wall Street

From an article in Huffington Post: As a teenager, Don Shaffer's first job was at a country club, caddying for some of the most successful men in America. On weekends, he had a front row seat to conversations between Wall Street traders and executives that most investors would die to listen in on. The experience inspired him to go into finance, but not for the reasons one might assume.

"Basically, none of them could explain what they did to me," Shaffer recalled of the executives he met weekly. "I come from a long line of Quaker farmers and small-business people in the Philadelphia area, and my father was a sheets and towels salesman. I was confused as to why the wealthiest and highest-status people couldn't describe what they did. Since then I have been obsessed with the financial system and how it works, and with making it so finance is serving businesses and the economy, instead of the other way around."

Today, Shaffer tries to live that mission every day as the President and CEO of RSF Social Finance, an "impact investing" fund that specializes in direct lending to social enterprises.

Students, faculty, parents and friends gathered Thursday at the Tidewater Waldorf School in Eliot, Maine, to unveil a plaque honoring the man who donated the land and building for the school, and to celebrate the school's traditional fall celebration, Michaelmas. After the plaque was unveiled, Elisabeth Robinson, the daughter of the donor, Douglas McBryde Kinney, spoke about what it meant to the school and to her. She and her husband, Jeffrey Robinson, were among a small circle of seven founders of the school in 1999. "My father is a smart, successful man," she said. "The one investment he believes in the most is education. He bought the land when we needed it."

The Corvallis Waldorf School fourth-graders were busy Friday afternoon removing invasive species from the Greenbelt Land Trust's Evergreen conservation property outside of Philomath. As with all invasive species, these displace native plants on which wildlife, insects and birds rely for food and habitat. This year, students from Corvallis Waldorf, Muddy Creek Charter and Kings Valley Charter schools are working to help restore the area's habitat.

The actress Tilda Swinton jetted back from promoting her Oscar-tipped movie We Need To Talk About Kevin in Spain to clean her children's school. The Beach star is currently on a promo tour for the movie ahead of the upcoming awards season, and was carrying out interviews in Europe when she dashed back to her home in Scotland to attend cleaning duties at the private Moray Steiner School.

When engaged in what looks like child's play, preschoolers are actually behaving like scientists, according to a new report in the journal Science: forming hypotheses, running experiments, calculating probabilities and deciphering causal relationships about the world.

We have a lot happening on the Why Waldorf Works website, including a new job postings page. Please send us your school's employment openings. Submissions should include AWSNA member school or institute name, position that is open, and contact information (email address, phone number, web link to your school). Your job listing will be up for three months or until you inform us that the post has been filled (please do let us know so that we can include the information in our "People" section!) Please send submissions to the web editor atwebeditor@awsna.org.

AWSNA ALUMNI Service Weekend 2013 HEADS HANDS AND HEARTS IN DETROT! Be there and show you care!

This year the traveling Service Weekend will be at the Detroit Waldorf School in the much beset with economic woes city of Detroit. The school will get us painting, digging, wiring, carpentering (skills anyone?) and generally sprucing up the beautiful old building that houses this little Waldorf school. See the Motor City while lending a hand to a school with a long-standing special mission to serve Detroit's children of all nationalities and economic levels.

Details coming soon.

SAVE THE DATE: June 24-27, 2013

AWSNA Summer Conference Co-Sponsored by the Anthroposophical Society

Practical Life, Meditation, and the Waldorf School: The Anthroposophical Challenge.

Please inform your communities and mark your calendars!

You are welcome to send Waldorf-related events for posting on our web site.

AWSNA provides leadership to schools by facilitating resources, networks and research as they strive towards excellence and build healthy school communities. The Association performs functions that its member schools and institutes could not do alone, including:· Outreach and advocacy · Accreditation and school support services · Professional development activities · Research and publications Please contact us if you have any questions about AWSNA or this or any other newsletter